About New Watcher: Website Monitoring for Uptime, Content, and Performance

Why we built it

Every website goes down eventually. A server hiccup, a failed deployment, an expired certificate, a DNS change that did not propagate — the causes vary, but the result is the same: your site is unreachable, and you are the last person to find out. Usually a customer tells you, or worse, you discover it hours later when checking analytics and seeing a suspicious gap.

Manual monitoring does not scale. You cannot check your sites every few minutes, and even if you could, you would miss the 3 AM outage or the slow performance degradation that builds over days. About New Watcher automates the entire process. It checks your sites on a schedule, detects problems as they happen, and notifies you through the channels you actually use — email, Slack, Discord, or a custom webhook.

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What About New Watcher can do

About New Watcher combines three types of monitoring in one platform. Instead of using separate services for uptime, content changes, and performance, you set everything up in one place and manage it from a single dashboard.

Who it is for

• Developers - monitor your own projects and client sites. Get alerted to outages and performance issues before users report them. Verify that deployments did not break anything.
• Agencies - keep all client websites under one roof. When something goes down, you know about it before the client does. That is the difference between a proactive partner and a reactive one.
• E-commerce businesses - every minute of downtime is lost revenue. Uptime monitoring with fast alerts means you can respond to outages before they significantly affect sales.
• SaaS companies - track API response times and availability. Set thresholds for acceptable performance and get notified when they are breached. Use the data for SLA reporting.
• Content and SEO teams - monitor competitor pages for changes. Track pricing updates, new product listings, or content modifications on pages that matter to your strategy.

Uptime monitoring in detail

Uptime monitoring is the foundation. About New Watcher sends HTTP requests to your URLs at regular intervals — as often as every minute on paid plans. If a check fails, the system retries to confirm it is not a temporary glitch, then sends an alert through your configured channels.

The checks go beyond simple "is it up" verification. The monitor detects:

• HTTP errors - 500, 502, 503, and other server-side failures
• Redirect loops - when a page keeps redirecting without reaching a final destination
• SSL certificate issues - expired or misconfigured certificates that cause browser warnings
• Timeout failures - when a server takes too long to respond
• Unexpected status codes - any response that does not match what you expect

When an incident is detected, you receive a notification with the details: what failed, when, and what the server returned. When the site recovers, you get a resolution notification with the total downtime duration. The full incident history is available in your dashboard for reporting and analysis.

Content monitoring

Not all important changes involve downtime. Sometimes you need to know when the content of a page changes — a competitor updates their pricing, a legal notice is modified, your own site shows unexpected content after a deployment, or a third-party page you depend on changes its structure.

Content monitoring tracks the text content of any public web page. When a change is detected, you receive a notification showing what changed. This is useful for:

• Competitor intelligence - track pricing pages, feature lists, or landing page copy. Know when competitors make changes without manually checking their sites.
• Compliance monitoring - watch legal pages, terms of service, or regulatory notices for updates that might affect your business.
• Deployment verification - confirm that a deployment actually updated the expected content. Catch cases where a release went out but the CDN is still serving stale content.
• Third-party dependency tracking - monitor documentation pages or API references from services you integrate with. Get notified when they change something that might affect your integration.

Performance tracking

A site can be technically "up" but painfully slow. Performance degradation often builds gradually — a database query gets slower as data grows, a CDN configuration drifts, or a third-party script adds latency. By the time someone complains, the problem has been there for weeks.

Performance tracking monitors response times over time. You can set thresholds for acceptable performance and get notified when they are exceeded. The historical data shows trends, so you can spot gradual degradation before it becomes a crisis.

This data is also valuable for post-deployment analysis. If response times jump after a release, you can see exactly when the change happened and correlate it with your deployment timeline.

Alerts that reach you

Monitoring is only useful if the alerts actually get to the right person at the right time. About New Watcher supports multiple notification channels that you can combine:

• Email - the universal fallback. Works for everyone, needs no additional setup.
• Slack - post alerts to a team channel. Ideal for development and operations teams that already live in Slack.
• Discord - for teams and communities that use Discord as their primary communication tool.
• Custom webhooks - send alert data to any URL. Integrate with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Telegram bots, or your own internal systems.

You can configure different channels for different monitors. Critical production sites might alert via Slack and email simultaneously, while a low-priority staging environment only sends an email. The flexibility means you get notified without getting overwhelmed.

Practical use cases

Post-deployment verification - after every release, your monitors confirm that the site is still up, responding within expected time, and serving the correct content. If something breaks, you know within minutes — not when a customer reports it the next morning.

Client site management - agencies managing dozens of client websites need a central view of their health. One dashboard shows uptime status, recent incidents, and performance trends across all sites. When a client asks "was there downtime last week?", you have the data.

Competitor tracking - set up content monitors on competitor pricing pages, feature comparison tables, or job listings. Changes in any of these can signal strategic shifts that are worth knowing about early.

SLA reporting - if you provide uptime guarantees to customers, you need data to back them up. Uptime history and incident timelines give you the numbers for SLA reports without manual tracking.

E-commerce availability - monitor your checkout flow, product pages, and payment endpoints. Downtime on any of these directly affects revenue. Fast alerts mean faster recovery and fewer lost sales.

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Plans overview

• Free - explore the core monitoring workflow. Set up a few monitors and see how the system works. Good for personal projects and evaluation.
• Starter - higher check frequency, more monitors, and full alert channel support. Built for freelancers, small teams, and anyone with production sites to watch.
• Pro - the full feature set for demanding environments. More monitors, faster check intervals, extended history retention, and priority support. For agencies, SaaS companies, and teams running multiple production services.

All plans include all three monitoring types — uptime, content, and performance. The difference is in check frequency, number of monitors, and history retention. Start with Free to evaluate, then scale up as your monitoring needs grow.

FAQ

How quickly will I be notified of downtime?

It depends on your check frequency. On paid plans, checks run as often as every minute. After a failure is confirmed (usually two consecutive failed checks to avoid false alarms), the alert is sent immediately.

Can I monitor sites I do not own?

Yes. Uptime and content monitoring work on any publicly accessible URL. This is commonly used for competitor tracking, dependency monitoring, and third-party service verification.

Can I use multiple alert channels at the same time?

Yes. You can combine email, Slack, Discord, and webhooks. Different monitors can use different channel configurations.

What happens when my site recovers?

You receive a recovery notification with the total downtime duration. The incident is logged in your history for future reference and reporting.

Do I need to install anything on my server?

No. About New Watcher checks your sites externally, the same way your visitors access them. There is nothing to install or configure on your server.

Questions or ideas? Open About New Watcher and tell us what you need to monitor.